Keeping an Eye on Your Success with Google Alerts

What is Google Alerts?

Google Alerts is a free, versatile online tool that allows you to monitor your online reputation, which is a crucial part of growing your business. This tool will enable you to track what competitors are saying about your business, what customers are saying, and when you are mentioned on other sites.

Why You Should Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts allows you to listen in on any online conversation that mentions your business - whether it be from people supporting you or bashing you. Because many small businesses don't have the budget to pay for media monitoring, Google Alerts is a fantastic stand-in. If you're not ready to invest in a Public Relations firm, use Google Alerts to send you regular reports about your business and how and where people are talking about it.

Ways to Use Google Alerts

Monitor Your Reputation

It's important to know who's talking about you. When you know who's writing positive online reviews about your business, you can use their feedback to promote your business on your website and social media accounts. On the flip side, when you know who's writing negative online reviews about your
business, you'll have a better chance of handling the problem before it turns into a crisis.

Track Trends

If you want your business to be successful, it's essential to keep up with industry news and trends. It can be overwhelming and time-consuming to keep up with every bit of news that may affect your business and customers though, and if you're a small business, you might not have the budget to hire a full-time social media marketer. Google Alerts can be set up for industry-related words that you feel are important to track.

An example might be if I worked as a charter captain. I would want to track keywords related to the fishing industry so I can keep up to date on the news related to my niche, my targeted customers, and my competitors.

Provide Great Customer Service

One way to provide excellent customer service is through engaging with your fans and customers online. Google Alerts can be used to track when customers mention you in glowing reviews. Use this as the opportunity to reach out personally to those customers and thank them for sharing their positive feedback and telling their friends about you. By going the extra mile and sending a personalized thank you note, you can earn lifelong loyal customers, and Google Alerts makes it easy to do that.

Google Alerts can also be useful in addressing customers who have had bad experiences. With Alerts, you can know who the customer is and what issue they're having so that you can easily reach out to them and try to find a solution.

Monitor for Unlinked Mentions

In some cases, people will mention your business without linking back to you. Because links help you rank in Google and help people easily navigate the web, it's important to consider reaching out to the author and asking them to add the link.

Scout out the Competition

By studying your competition, you can learn what marketing techniques they're using and use them as inspiration for your own business's marketing tactics.

Most businesses are also posting blog articles on a regular basis. By keeping up with what your competitors are posting, it can help give so some ideas on new topics for your own blog. It also keeps you informed if your competitors are doing the same to you.

Checking for Plagiarism

It's essential to keep an eye on your intellectual property since hackers can take your content. To set Google Alerts to monitor plagiarism from one of your pages, pick out some unique text from your content that Google should only find on your site. Insert the text into the search field with double quotes and choose "add alert."

If that content is ever duplicated anywhere on the web, Google will flag it and send a report to you. You then have the opportunity to take action and have the plagiarized content removed before it tarnishes your website's reputation.

Setting Up Google Alerts

Google Alerts allows you to keep tabs on who is mentioning your business, products, services, and website. You can set up to 1,000 Alerts per email address to help you monitor activity for keywords and phrases of your choice - this means you can track almost every word you can think of related to your business.

Google Alerts is a free online tool that's very easy to set up. Here are the steps to get you started:

1. Go to Google.com/alerts, then sign into your Google account.
2. Enter the terms you want Google Alerts to monitor for you. You can always edit these terms later. Start by adding your name and the name of your business, along with any keywords and phrases related to your brand.
3. Click the "Show Options" drop down to choose where your alerts are delivered, how often you get them, how many you want to receive, along with language, region, and other options.
4. Once you've chosen your preferences, click "Create Alert." You can view your alerts in a list and change your preferences as needed.
5. You'll also find some Alert Suggestions from Google below your list of alerts. You can choose to add them if they're relevant to you.
6. That's it! Now you'll receive email alerts for the search terms and phrases you've entered.